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FEATURED ARTIST in Still Harbor's Anchor Magazine

Please join writer, Elizabeth Kirschner, for a celebration and reception of her award-winning memoir, WAKING THE BONES, on Tuesday, May 3rd at 6:00 p.m. at West End Theatre, 959 Islington Street, Portsmouth, NH 03801. Kirschner will be joined by co-collaborators, composer Pamela Marshall and painter Sirarpi Heghinian Walzer in order to create a dynamic evening.

Kirschner’s WAKING THE BONES, published by RiverRun Books last spring, was the winner of the Inaugural North Street Book Prize for best work of nonfiction by an independent author. The book was selected out of a field of four hundred international entries. The cover art is Heghinian Walzer’s.

Kirschner has published six previous volumes of poetry, including, Surrender to Light, 2009, Cherry Grove Editions and My Life as a Doll, 2008, Autumn House Press. My Life as a Doll was nominated for the Lenore Marshall Prize and named Kirschner as the Literary Arts Fellow in state of Maine in 2010. She has also published over two dozen essays with The Coal Hill Review and is widely published in other literary magazines, both nationally and internationally.

She has been writing and teaching across four decades. Most recently, she taughtin Fairfield University’s low-residency Program in Creative Writing. Extensive teachingexperience includes Boston College, Boston University and Carnegie-Mellon University. She now offers local Poetry and Memoir Writing Workshops.

Kirschner has been collaborating with Pamela Marshall and Sirarpi Heghinian Walzer for years....

http://stillharbor.org/anchormagazine/2016/11/3/sirarpi-heghinian-walzer

ARTIST STATEMENT

My mixed media abstractions echo the ideas and values that take center stage in my thoughts, representing an ongoing tension between freedom and containment and edging both the artist and the viewer closer to that place where chaos can erupt into clarity and memories are distilled into single dramatic moments. I use the color white to suggest purity and simplicity and to act as a unifying field for deliberately juxtaposed disparate images. 

I resonate with the term Pentimento, made famous by Lillian Hellman. The term comes from an Italian word and describes an artist changing her mind, or “repenting.” This idea is made visible by a former painting peeking though the over-painting when it ages. This term feels true to me not only as a painting phenomenon but also as a human one, describing how the past percolates into the present in our lives. My memories color and shape my present reality into layered compositions—an amalgam of different selves fusing together in the moment.

Born in Aleppo, Syria, I immigrated to the United States when I was 13 years old. This immigrant experience also finds expression in my work. In many pieces, I express my empathy for those suffering loss, displacement, and the universal fear of homelessness. 

I believe an artist’s role is to reveal the beauty in things that are dying or simply not pretty. To this end, I remove idealized female forms from magazines and reformulate them in my art, inventing a more passionate, reasoned, and realistic beauty. §

For more information, contact swalzer@swalzer.com